What can I say. I am not surprised. You could also add the chart of where the US is ranked in math education (last time I checked it was somewhere around number 15). Or if you have doubts watch the "Are you smarter than a fifth grader?"

I saw that show once and swore to never watch again when the woman couldn't answer the $500,000question "Which is the only continent that is also a country?" She was going to say North America... Sweetie there are 26 countries in NA.

I'm generally not that impressed with scholastic rankings on an international level. They're probably not totally meaningless, but I haven't seen a study of that sort designed in a way that really says something. Education is a difficult thing to measure. How do you measure creativity, how do you measure independant thinking? Even in something as apparently straight-forward as math there are grey areas. Does the student know a lot of formulas by rote, or do they understand the principles behind the formulas? It's entirely possible the US is falling behind in education, but I don't think these kinds of studies really are proof of that.

But yeah, the evolution thing is just embarrassing. It's that kind of thing that I meant when I posted before about how ignorance is having a bit of a golden age in this country.

But yeah, the evolution thing is just embarrassing. It's that kind of thing that I meant when I posted before about how ignorance is having a bit of a golden age in this country.

Well it's a strange kind of ignorance where people know something about it but don't accept it, even as a likelihood, let alone as fact. Personally, I don't think of that as ignorance, rather ideology and "anti-knowledge". There are people who go around actively promoting the notion that there is a vast conspiracy among scientists to hide the "truth". In other words, there's a propaganda machine at work.

Creationism disregards not only biology, but geology and physics. Then every other field at least indirectly.

I suspect it dramatically lowers the pool of new scientists in any field when reasoning and pursuit of knowledge are made out to be the bad guys. As IJ said in another thread, not questioning is seen as an attribute in these kinds of religions.

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